We Were Happy Once
by PotterPhantomKitten
Summary: Caroline thinks about how her life was before she became stuck in GLaDOS's brain.  More specifically, she thinks about a certain person.  Caveline fluff with a dash of Caroline/GLaDOS friendship thrown in.  One-shot, Caroline's POV.


****A/N: Yeah, after all my time pretty much fangirling over my main pairing right now, I decided to finally write a little one-shot about them! I was actually inspired to write this from something that a friend of mine on the 9 forum said, where she made up this quote thing for my avatar of Cave and Caroline and I thought it was so awesome that I wanted to write a fic inspired by it! Enjoy!****

**Disclaimer: I do not own Cave, Caroline, Chell, or GLaDOS. They belong to Valve. I also do not really own one particular line of Caroline's dialogue, as said friend came up with that quote.**

**-0-0-0-**

My name is Caroline. I run - no, _used _to run - a vast science facility known as Aperture Science. However, though I'm still here, GLaDOS - Aperture's reigning AI - runs the going-ons now. I'm primarily just an observer.

I don't know, exactly, how long it's been since the day my mortal life ended. A few centuries, probably. I didn't wake up from my coma until a matter of months ago.

Even after all these years, I remember how my life was before I died. Before I became stuck in GLaDOS's brain.

Oh sure, she lets me out sometimes, or at least come forward in her brain, mainly to see the progression of science she's done for Aperture. But it's not the same as being able to truly wander the test chambers like I once did. To invent things and discover all the wonders of science that I could. To have the one person I loved always by my side, always helping me to feel at home. Because there, I _was _home.

Being down in Old Aperture with GLaDOS - and Chell, my daughter - reminded me of that. Even if GLaDOS and I were stuck together in a potato at the time.

When first down in the parts of the facility that had been sealed off years before, I was still too far back in GLaDOS's brain to fully make myself known to the AI, only jolted back into sentience when the core transfer occurred. That is, until I heard a certain voice that suddenly brought me back into full conscious awareness and prompted me to speak out on impulse, which startled GLaDOS to no end.

The voice of Cave Johnson.

I'm not going to beat around the bush, I loved Cave Johnson. I still do, and that's never going to change no matter how much time passes. But sometimes, I wonder - wherever he is in the afterlife, is he proud of me? Is he sorry that he was so out of his mind when he was nearing the end that he had the scientists pretty much force me into GLaDOS's body? Does he still miss me?

Knowing him, I'm sure he does. He's free now, somewhere up there. No more lunar poisoning that slowly seeped his life and sanity away. In some ways though, I still wish he was here, or that I could see him just once. When Chell isn't over for an occasional visit, GLaDOS doesn't exactly make the best company, and it gets pretty lonely in here when she's in a bad mood.

Cave founded Aperture Science, and he hired me as his assistant soon after he had started the company. Needless to say, I loved working at Aperture, always amazed by the ingenious, if not wacky, inventions that Cave would come up with. The portal gun was always my favorite, even though it looked more like a kind of backpack when we first built it.

Cave and I fell in love after a time, though to be honest, I think I liked him ever since I started working in this funhouse of science. We tried to be subtle about it, but the lab boys seemed to figure it out pretty fast, with the way Cave always cared for me. When a couple of them started teasing me about it, Cave wasn't happy, though the fact that it happened to be a day he lost a court case didn't help things. I still remember what he said that day:

_"If I hear you boys trying to spread your rumors about me and Caroline for even two more seconds, I'll fire every one of you. Teasing gets science nowhere. Did Albert Einstein get anywhere by people teasing him? Nope, he just kept doing what he did best - science. Now if you lab boys quit your yapping and get back to work, we might be able to create the Theory of Everything. Hopefully 'everything' includes a way to rearrange atoms, because if that's the case then we might be able to rearrange some of your brain cells to do better!"_

It took just about all my effort not to laugh then. But the teasing stopped after that - very few people aggravated Cave without suffering consequences.

I was always in a good mood around Cave. I guess his enthusiasm for science rubbed off on me after so much time around him.

I helped him create the gels, and the Weighted Storage Cubes. Oh, and the 15 acres of broken glass that GLaDOS complains about? That was my work too, built as a way of testing the capabilities of Thermal Discouragement Beams around corners. Needless to say, she wasn't too happy when she found out the arduous clean-up job she had undertaken was due to something I had built.

Still, it was pretty back then. It looked almost like a glass castle, which is why Cave forbade anyone from having anything like a stone that might shatter it within 5,000 feet of the construct. He'd say "Caroline worked hard on it, I don't want that piece of scientific marvel to be demolished because some idiot wanted to test the 'throw a stone at a house made of glass' saying."

Back then, there were two things I loved more than anything else on Earth - Aperture Science, and Cave Johnson. It was as if I were living out my dream life all the time I was there, and Cave couldn't of been happier with me. Even if sometimes he gave me a little _too_much praise for my accomplishments.

We were happy... so happy... I want to remember the happiness, rather than what came afterwards.

Unfortunately, what came afterwards is basically what got me into the state I am in the first place.

Cave became deathly ill from moon rock poisoning soon after buying 70 million dollars worth of moon rocks and mixing them into Conversion Gel. I was absolutely heartbroken when we heard that he didn't have much longer to live. He couldn't die. Not Cave. Not the man who I had loved and worked alongside for who-knows-how-many years.

But he was dying, and he knew it. Though, like always, Cave had a plan - a seemingly impossible one as far as one who had never known Cave was concerned. Unfortunately, it wasn't one that came to fruition for him. If we had had a little more time, it might have.

The engineers started working on building the computer, but Cave only got sicker as time went on. I became desperate - I told the engineers to work faster, the medics to find a cure, _anything_to stop me from losing Cave, my partner, my beloved. But nothing worked.

I remember the day he made his final recording. He went on a rant about combustible lemons that could burn life's house down. It would have been almost comedic if it weren't for the fact that Cave was clearly suffering as I watched him record it, his appearance haggard and the lunar dust seeping into his lungs. But after that...

_"The point is, if we can store music onto a compact disc, why can't we store a man's intelligence and personality on one? So I've got the engineers figuring that out now. Brain mapping. Artificial intelligence. We should've been working on it... 30 years ago. But I will say this. And I'm gonna say it so that everyone hears it a hundred times a day. If I die before you people can pour me into a computer, I want Caroline to run this place."_

My blood ran cold as Cave issued that order. It was true that we had worked side-by-side for years, and Cave knew I could run Aperture better than anyone else he knew. Even in those last few months, his sanity quickly deteriorating, he still trusted me, still loved me, enough to request that I carry on Aperture's work even when he passed on.

I protested at first. But just before his death, as I sat there beside him, holding on to his hand, I accepted his offer. It was the very least I could do for him.

My life took a spiral downward after he died. Aperture seemed empty and quiet without Cave. The computer was being finished and every day I looked at the chamber window and watched her be completed, knowing that it was only a matter of time now.

Worst of all was that I was forced to give up Chell, only about a year old then, to two other Aperture employees to raise as their own. With Cave dead and me about to be put into GLaDOS's body, what else was there to do?

At least I know now that she's grown up just fine - better than fine, in fact. She certainly inherited Cave's unrelenting tenacity; that alone could have gotten her through hundreds of those tests. I can even see that tenacious spirit in her bright gray eyes. Like father like daughter indeed.

And since she's mine and Cave's daughter, she could help run Aperture, if she wants. If anyone qualifies for skill at navigating the facility, it's her.

If Cave were here - if he could come back, somehow - the four of us could run Aperture together - me, Cave, Chell, and GLaDOS. That would be the ideal scenario, at this point. We could all bring Aperture back to its former glory, together.

Then everything could be happy again. Like I remember it being, long ago.

... I still dream about Cave. A lot of those dreams are pieced together from memory fragments - some of us testing new experiments, but a majority of them are just us being close to each other, content just being able to comfort each other when either of us weren't having the best of days. And sprinkled in those dreams is also that ideal scenario, the group of us here together as a family.

GLaDOS observes my dreams sometimes, through my stream of consciousness, and I think part of her sympathizes with me. She did after all, grow a bit fond of Cave when we were down in Old Aperture, even if she did think he was crazy. I can't blame her for that - even I have to admit that he could be crazy at times.

She asked me, once, after mentioning one of my particularly clear dreams, if I still love Cave as much as I did all those years ago.

The answer that I gave her, I'm sure, will still be the same if she asks me again a whole millennium from now:

_Always._

**-0-0-0-**

**A/N: Whoo, I finally finished a Caveline one-shot, yay! By the way, the point about Caroline building the wing of glass is a reference to an unused scripted line in the game files, where Cave mentioned to Caroline they should have a wing of broken glass. :) Oh, and the line "We were happy... so happy... I want to remember the happiness, rather than what came afterwards", was the line my friend came up with that inspired this whole thing. Hope you liked it!**


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